 Kristina Hendricks. So the idea of this video is to allow you to introduce yourself a little bit to Arts 1 students. I wonder if you could step by saying something about your background and what you did before coming to UBC. So I got a PhD in Philosophy in 2000 from the University of Texas at Austin, so I did my graduate work at Texas. And before I came to UBC I was teaching at a two-year college at the University of Wisconsin system. So Wisconsin has a whole bunch of two-year colleges and a whole bunch of four-year colleges, and you can transfer straight from one to the other. So I was teaching in a place called University of Wisconsin Rock County, and I was the only philosopher on campus, which was kind of fun. But maybe if the students wanted so many else to teach them philosophy, kind of too bad. But it was a nice little small campus. And then we moved to Vancouver in 2004, so I've been here since then. What made you choose Philosophy, and particularly your specialization, Continental Philosophy? That's a good question. Sometimes I talk to my students about philosophy and why people would go into it, because it's not an obvious choice for many careers. Although it turns out it's very useful for lots of careers because if you can think well and you can write well and you can speak well, then you're going to do well in lots of different sorts of jobs. But I wasn't thinking that at the time. I was just thinking, this is really interesting. So I was a political science major as an undergrad, and I took some political philosophy courses. And then I took just a couple of philosophy courses as I thought, well, maybe this will be complimentary, and I just absolutely loved it. And I can't explain why. It's just one of those things where you find something you really enjoy, and I didn't want to do anything else. So I ended up getting a double major in philosophy in political science. And at the time I didn't do Continental Philosophy, and Continental Philosophy is just a word that came out of England for the Continent. And that means France and Germany and Spain, I think. And I didn't do Continental Philosophy as an undergraduate. That came in graduate school. And again, it just resonated with me. I did a lot of work in French philosophy. I studied people like Derrida, but also in German, a philosophy Hegel and Heidegger. And I ended up doing a lot of work on Michel Foucault, which is what I still do a lot of research on. So if you could say a little bit about your research, the particular things that you do and write about? Well, I do some work in Foucault. So my graduate work was on the political role of intellectuals in Foucault. And I did a fair number of publications on that line. And then I started moving on into some of Foucault's later work, where he starts talking about the ancient Greeks and philosophy as a way of life, as living your life in order to better yourself. And I got very interested in that. So I'm pursuing that line lately. But I also have branched off into something entirely different, which is called the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. So that's where you try to engage in empirical research to figure out what is most effective in teaching and learning. And I'm very interested in peer evaluation, peer feedback, which is what we do a lot in Arts One. I think it's extremely useful, but I'd like to be able to capture some more empirical evidence to show exactly what it does and why it's useful. So that's another area of my research. I'm kind of in two different areas. So we'll baptize in with the next thing I was going to ask, which is about your approach to teaching. Could you say a little bit more about that? I would like as much as possible, and this is one of the things I love about Arts One, I would like as much as possible to have the students be guiding their own learning, so pursuing things that are of most interest to them, which we can do in Arts One. So you read a text, you watch a lecture, and then you focus on what you want to write about, and you look through the book again, and you find things that would help you to make your argument. We offer you a list of paper topics, but within those you choose, and even within an essay topic, we usually provide enough space for students to really go off into what they're most interested in. And I love the seminars too because we can have those seminars be guided by what the students want to talk about as much as possible. So of course, yes, there's the lectures where we give our views, and there's also the space and quite a bit of space for students to make their own arguments and their own discussions. So I like to do that as much as possible of my other courses, unfortunately they're much larger, and it's harder to do. I guess you've begun talking about this already, but could you say more about what attracts or attracted you to Arts One? I have to say that in the beginning when it attracted me to Arts One, and I started teaching in 2005 in Arts One, in the beginning it was the reading list because I just, I'm a philosopher, and we do a lot of the sort of classic philosophical texts in Arts One, and I think they're important, but I also was excited about reading, doing more work in literature and history because those are areas I don't know that much about. And I loved the idea of reading things that I don't know that much about, that I'm a beginner on to with the students, and we learn together. That was just so exciting to me, and I learned so much from the other professors and from the students. So that was what attracted me in the beginning, and then later as I kept teaching it, what I really love about it is the students who are in the program. That it's often, it attracts people who really are excited about reading and writing and talking, and they get very engaged, and they're such interesting people, and I think we have a fantastic year. People start to get to know each other quite well. You have a full year to get to know your classmates and your professor, and I get to keep up with these people over the course of their undergraduate career, and even after I still email with some Arts One students from like six or seven years ago. So I think that's another thing that I just really love about it. And then this year you're teaching a quite eclectic bunch of texts from Plato, Kant, Hain, Freud, Foucault. Can you say anything about one or two of those? So Foucault, of course, that's somebody that I do, I've done a lot of research on, and the Foucault text is the history of sexuality volume one, which is probably his shortest published book, which you might think, well, maybe that would be easier, but it turns out to be a very, very complicated text with a very, very complicated argument. However, I still think it's important because it gets you to think about sexuality in a very different way than you might have thought about it generally than is often talked about in popular culture and medical and psychiatric psychological disciplines. So that it really sort of twists, I don't want to say twists in a bad way, but it really gets you to move beyond a common way of thinking and to really looking at it from a different perspective, which even if you end up not agreeing with what Foucault has to say, I think is an extremely important exercise. And further, he also criticizes Freud, which is part of the reason why we're reading Freud and then Foucault and this remake theme. Freud, in his discussion of the Dora case, which is a woman that he was treating in psychoanalysis in the early 20th century, does a lot of confession. Well, he gets her to confess a lot of what she has been engaging in in terms of her relationships with men. And then Foucault comes along and again makes us think about what it means to confess our innermost secrets and our innermost lives to our doctors, our friends, our parents, possibly even our teachers, or even to the public these days. That's what's so interesting about Foucault and confession because with blogs and YouTube, people will put up lots of things in public. And he wants us to think about why we're doing that and how power and discipline of ourselves might be involved in doing that. So that's something we'll look at. Sounds fantastic. What else are you looking forward to this coming year? Well, in terms of Arts 1, meeting a new group of students and starting a new theme, which is always exciting because again, it gets me to learn a whole bunch of new things. It really expands my own mind. So working with new people, we've got a new team of people this year that I've never, well, I've worked with Robert Crawford before, but otherwise nobody else. And yeah, just reading new things, discussing them with students. I'm also really excited about working on the Arts 1 digital project, which John, you've certainly done a lot with while I've been gone on sabbatical to record our videos. I'd like to do more in terms of Twitter. I'm going to start blogging with my students this year, which I hadn't before in Arts 1. I'd like to do it in my other philosophy course, but I have over a hundred students in that course and I just can't see it happening. I just don't have time to read that many blogs. But yeah, I'm really looking forward to working with Arts 1 digital too. And what advice do you have for an incoming student of Arts 1 or even maybe somebody using the Arts 1 digital website? I would say for an incoming student of Arts 1, since they need to keep, they need to write all of the essays, right? We require that students write 12 essays over the course of the year and then they can drop two, but they can't drop them unless they've written them. So you have to keep up. That's the thing. It's so important to keep up from week to week. And it can be very, very challenging when you've got a full book many weeks and an essay do on every other week or so to keep up with the reading. But if you get behind and you miss an essay and you get behind on that, it can really, really compound very, very quickly. So keeping up I think is just the most obvious advice that I can think of. Plus the seminars and the tutorials are what you make of them. So instead of just sitting there hoping something happens, contribute to the seminars and the tutorials and you will get a lot more out of it. So being an active contributor, being an active speaker. In terms of the Arts 1 digital website, people are much more free to pick and choose what they want to do. But I still think that if you really want to get the most out of what we're doing, if you can, read the whole book of whichever, you know, you don't have to do it every week, but whichever you're most interested in, I think it really helps. We assign whole books for a reason that we think, I at least think that that you get more of the argument in a clearer way if you don't just pick and choose parts of it. Because you're missing a whole different section if you only read half the book. So that goes for everybody. But especially if you just want to follow along in a few sections of the Arts 1 digital course. Okay, great. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Look forward to next year.